Employment Intensive Investment Branch

The Employment Intensive Investment Programme (EIIP), of the ILO works with governments, employers' and workers' organizations, the private sector and community associations in orienting infrastructure investments towards the creation of higher levels of productive employment and towards the improvement of access to basic goods and services for the poor. This combined use of local participation in planning with the utilization of locally available skills, technology, materials, and appropriate work methods has proven to be an effective and economically viable approach to infrastructure works in developing countries.

The importance of infrastructure in providing access to basic services and promoting development is widely understood. Half of public investments in most developing countries is in infrastructure, and in many cases, over 50 per cent of this investment (rising to as much as 80 or 90 per cent in the least developed countries), is funded by external donors. The impact of these investments in infrastructure can be greatly increased, however, through a local level planning process that identifies appropriate interventions based on the needs of local communities.

Likewise, the employment potential of these infrastructure investments is vast, but is often not realized, as many projects are equipment-intensive, frequently using foreign contractors. This may be necessary for airports, motorways or heavy bridges, but employment-intensive alternatives using labour-based technologies are available for more basic infrastructure, offering major advantages in terms of using infrastructure investments to create local employment and incomes, as well as skills and capacities.

The EIIP uses the infrastructure project cycle as a means of realizing its objectives of employment creation, local participation and resource use, and the promotion of good governance: starting with local level planning, through implementation using labour-based technologies and small scale contracting, and ending with appropriate maintenance. All these stages of the project cycle form suitable entry points for promoting the employment intensive investment approach.

literature and studies on employment elasticises different economic sectors and relative employment impact of sectoral investments

Assess availability of data

Data availability will be assessed from both macro- (top-down) and micro- (bottom-up) perspectives.

From the macro- perspective, the consultant will look at comparative data on contributions of different economic sectors and sub-sectors to GDP and to employment creation, data on public and private investment by economic sector as well data on the impact of public investment budgets to job creation. A key element of this work will be developing reliable methods to assess infrastructure components of national budgets and accounts and of different economic sectors. This data review will assess the availability of such data in comparable form, availability of data on investments in infrastructure broken down by categories such as roads, irrigation, drainage, water supply, afforestation, etc.